I believe in the resurrection.
With its birdsong and flowery filigree,
springtime is a useful simile,
but the meaning moves in only one direction.
It is a life that was, and then was not:
true flesh with dirt beneath the fingernails,
an eye color that history has since forgot,
and organs you could weigh in market scales.
I believe in a bodily reanimation:
proteins and ATP and the Krebs
cycle sputtering to life like a cold engine—
stitching back together the webs
of tissue that had only started to rot,
standing again with tension and attention.
The life of the risen god is not
a metaphor for life or nature’s seasons.
I know that this belief offends all reason;
it is a denial of nature and nature’s rule–
as plausible as gravity’s reverse
or the birth of a parentless universe.
And so I am a fool, and the metaphors all are cruel
if there’s nothing real beneath the sign—
if there’s no reckoning for sin—
if death indeed will win
and the water will never be wine.
I believe in the resurrection.
Easter
